Jane Mayer

35th annual Key West Literary Seminar

Jane Mayer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995. She covers politics, culture, and national security for the magazine. Most recently, she is the author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, described by the New York Review of Books as “absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics … Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting.”

In 2008, she published the New York Times bestseller The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, which is based on her New Yorker articles and was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is also the co-author, with Jill Abramson, of Strange Justice, and, with Doyle McManus, of Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988. In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent.

Her numerous honors include the John Chancellor Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize; the Ridenhour Prize; the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.

Selected Bibliography

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016)The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008)Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994)